Teamgum @ TheNextWeb 2014

Teamgum was amongst the 96 Startups which were selected for the TNW Boost program and as a part of the package we were promised a stand to showcase our product, PR coverage and a star list of people we could meet and network with, thanks to WeTransfer.

The real vibe started even before the conference day. We could create our meeting.gs profile and were able to showcase ourselves to the investors visiting the arena. The voting for being up on stage was quite thrilling and it went down to the wire and we almost made it. We stood 13th out of 96 – not bad huh! We noticed that TNW Labs have some amazing products under induction like pr.co and others using which we could publish a fantastic PR for all the attendees and press who were visiting.

Before the event day came up, we came across an interesting fact. Patrick, Boris and the TNW core team had a product called as ‘Fleck’ a few years back which was apparently solving the same problem that Teamgum is solving and coincidently in a similar way using a browser plugin. It was good to chat with Patrick at the end and use his learnings which will help us a lot.

On the first day we had a stand and had loads of visitors visiting us. It was quite a lot of fun to pitch and demo our product to everyone and had some great feedback coming in. One thing we noticed was that a lot of people were curious and appreciated the kind of efforts we had put into our browser extension and the way Teamgum is used to not only share links but also to view what your team has been reading and all of it right inside the browser. It also gave us a few opportunities to probably integrate and explore opportunities with other products like Surfly and Zeef who are also doing interesting work with web links.

We could really break the ice with a lot of people we didn’t meet earlier in the day at the Heineken bash, which was a nice informal environment to talk and know people and share thoughts. I really don’t know what happened after a few hours after I dunked a few drinks 😉

The second day started off with the smell of freshly brewed coffee which was a refreshing change after the last night. There was a good line up of speakers but a couple of them which stood out for me were Nir Eyal who spoke about his latest book, Hooked. It talks about habit forming products and their methodologies of design and was quite power packed the way he had reverse engineered habit forming products like Facebook and Twitter.

The second speaker that caught my eye was Matt Ruby of Vooza. He had a natural flair to sarcasm in an entrepreneur’s life and connecting the day to day events and jargons used by them to the lighter side of life. Something which was really needed after a power packed 2 days.

Overall the TNW experience in Europe was a fantastic experience to meet new people, network, make friends, business connections, understand the market and dynamics and the whole city of Amsterdam in general.

See you soon again, TNW and Amsterdam!

About the Author

Divyesh Kharade is the Co-Founder and CEO of Deltecs InfoTech a company which endeavors to take employee and customer engagement to the next level through its products Teamgum (simplest team collaboration tool) and Drona Mobile (Enterprise Mobile Learning). He is Director at Bizpunditz ( Video Library of Indian Leaders & practitioners). He supports product-tech startups in India and mentoring them. Having done his engineering from Mumbai University he also serves as an advisor on the board of one more startup. He is also a guest writer on pluggd.in and yourstory.inwriting about his experiences regarding starting up, sales 2.0 and scaling a company. Divyesh is on Twitter at @divyeshkharade